Delta’s CEO is off to Paris while his airline struggles to recover from massive meltdown

By Chris Isidore and Isabel Rosales, CNN

New York (CNN) — Delta CEO Ed Bastian arrived in Paris Wednesday morning for the opening of the Olympics as his airline struggled to recover from a five-day meltdown that left an estimated half-million customers stranded by thousands of flight cancellations.

After a global tech outage that started Friday forced Delta to cancel nearly 8,000 flights on over the past several days, the company said it expects minimal cancellations on Wednesday and “normal” service on Thursday. But it could still be days before all of Delta’s passengers whose flights were canceled will be able to make it to their destinations, given the busy summer travel season and the lack of available seats on many flights. The company has also been unable to reunite many customers with their luggage.

Meanwhile, Bastian traveled to Paris for the Olympics, accordingly, where Delta is a sponsor of the US Olympic Team.

“Ed delayed this long-planned business trip until he was confident the airline was firmly on the path to recovery,” said a statement from Delta to CNN “As of Wednesday morning, Delta’s operations were returning to normal. Ed remains fully engaged with senior operations leaders.”

Bastian flew to Paris on a Delta commercial flight, not a private jet, the airline said. As the official airline of the US Olympic Team, the company is flying athletes, coaches and other support staff to Paris. Most CEOs of Olympic sponsors will probably be attending at least part of the Olympics, but those other CEOs have not had the customer service problems over the last week that Delta has suffered.

However, the union attempting to organize Delta flight attendants slammed the CEO for taking a “first class seat” to Paris instead of taking ownership of the massive meltdown.

“While Ed was flying to Paris last night, crew were sleeping in airports across the country. Flight Attendants expect an apology and accountability,” the Delta Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) organizing committee said in a statement. “We provided a roadmap to recovery and care for the affected crew members.”

AFA is a union is seeking to win the right to represent flight attendants working on Delta’s mainline flights and already represents flight attendants on Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air, which operates flights under the Delta Connection brand. CNN reached out to Delta to confirm the type of seat Bastian sat in during his travels, and an airline spokesperson responded that the airline had nothing to add.

The one union with significant membership at Delta is the Air Line Pilots Association, which has about 17,000 members at the airline. Asked about Bastian’s trip to Paris, Captain Darren Hartmann, the chairman of the union’s unit at Delta, said the union wasn’t particularly concern because it has been able to talk regularly with the front-line operations executives at Delta since the service problems began.

“Frankly it’s more important that we’re meeting with them every day,” Hartmann said. As far as Bastian not remaining stateside until the end of the service issues, Hartmann said “Ed has to do Ed.”

Delta has been asking employees to pull extra duty to try to address the company’s problems, with its IT staff working around the clock to try to fix a tech meltdown caused by a corrupted software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike late last week.

That bug disrupted computer systems around the globe. Although many airlines’ operations were disrupted, the problems proved to be far more widespread and long-lasting at Delta than at other carriers. Delta encountered severe problems with its crew tracking software that made it difficult to locate the pilots and flight attendants it needed to operate the flights.

Paris is a major European destination for the airline. Although there will be thousands of Americans traveling to Paris to watch the games, Bastian told CNBC in an interview earlier this month that Delta is, counterintuitively, likely to lose business because of the games. Many travelers are staying away from Paris if they were not planning to watch the Olympics, so travel volumes are less than they likely would have been without the event. Bastian estimated the Olympics will cost Delta about $100 million in lost revenue.

“Unless you’re going to the Olympics, people aren’t going to Paris… very few are,” Bastian told CNBC. “Business travel, you know, other type of tourism is potentially going elsewhere.”

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